Flawless

A Demi Moore thriller

Hitchcock
preferred blondes, but in Flawless,
the brunette Demi Moore fills the pumps once occupied by Janet Leigh, Kim Novak
and Eva Saint Marie. Moore plays Laura Quinn, an
unfulfilled American expatriate in London.
It’s 1960. She is 38, never married and determined to make a career in a world
where few women had careers. Laura sails each morning into the offices of the
giant London Diamond consortium like a frigate at full steam, impassive, ready
for the challenge of wearing a skirt in an old boy’s club.

Through
intelligence and diligence, she became the first female manager for a company
that virtually controls the world market through ownership of South Africa’s
diamond mines. But intelligence and diligence aren’t enough. Passed over for
every promotion, Laura quietly nurtures her resentment. When an opportunity
presents itself, Laura decides to participate in a daring, carefully plotted
robbery of her firm’s vault. She will help another person of grievance, the
elderly janitor Mr. Hobbs (Michael Caine), who has devised a plan. All she
needs to do is steal the entry code for the diamond vault below the firm’s
hard-edged, architecturally modern headquarters.

Directed
by Michael Radford (Il Postino), Flawless moves as efficiently as the
story shown behind the opening credits—a montage on the diamond trade beginning
with dark hands sifting for treasure in a muddy riverbed and continuing through
the cutting process that transforms raw stones into the multifaceted gems that
gleam from the fingers of women engaged to be married. The period details are
well executed. Laura has a simply smashing flat with Scandinavian modern
furniture and cool jazz LPs spinning on her turntable through the lonely
nights. Alas, one can’t call the film flawless. The compression of the story
doesn’t allow for character developments that seem tacked on for a feel-good
finish. Still, Flawless is a
suspenseful period thriller populated by characters whose potential was curbed
by a world that gave them few chances.

Caine
tends to dominate every scene where Hobbs
appears. With cloth cap in hand and an affable show of being humble, Hobbs is well aware that
he passes unnoticed but in plain sight down the cold, marbled corridors of wealth.
He’s a clever Cockney who has had years to devise the perfect crime while
pushing his mop through the night shift.

Amusing
himself by reading discarded office memos, he surprises Laura by showing her an
order that will terminate her employment in several weeks’ time. “I have a
proposal to put to you,” he begins. She is appalled at the very idea of theft,
but Hobbs, a
persuasive old devil, locates the well of her bitterness and draws from it to
sustain his own enterprise. He explains himself by saying that the meager
pension offered by London Diamond will be a slender reed to support his
upcoming retirement, but his motives run deeper than money.

Laura
has no idea how profoundly he hates a certain well-placed crook in the city of London or the scope of his
robbery scheme.

Flawless reaches its highest pitch of
suspense as Laura sneaks into the study of London Diamond’s owner, slipping
away from an elegant reception at his mansion (a favorite Hitchcock device) to
find the code to the vault, and later in the seconds-count execution of the
heist. Silent sentinels in the form of cameras watch over every corridor of the
London Diamond offices, but Laura identifies a flaw in the system, one-minute
gaps on the closed-circuit screen that allow the spry old janitor time to enter
and exit the vault unseen.

Flawless makes explicit a theme
implied in several of Hitchcock’s films: the frustrated, subordinate and
dependent existence of women in a work world dominated by men. And there is a
familiar character from many Hitchcock-era dramas: the eerily calm investigator
alert to all discrepancies and contradictions. In Flawless it’s a bird-like man with the apposite name of Finch. Are
his appraising eyes seeing through Laura’s story or is he merely checking out
her legs?